Monthly Archives: February 2011

Science and the Single Sports Metaphor

Posted on by

Call it fate, call it luck, Karma, whatever. I was thinking about the topic of the effort needed to do science, and then see that Doug Natelson has a post up on the subject (Battle hymn of the Tiger Professor), and Chad has already responded to it (Physics Takes Practice). Which just leaves me with the tired sports metaphor. In light of the recent Packers victory in the Super Bowl, perhaps it’s fitting to use a quote from Vince Lombardi:

Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.

So it is with science, or any profession. It’s not enough to want to be good at something if you aren’t willing to do the work needed to perform at a high level. Is anyone really surprised to find out how much time professional athletes spend training? Or that the physically gifted ones who don’t have a good work ethic tend to fall short when they reach the professional level? Anyone who has played sports has probably had the realization that regardless of their initial skill level, getting better required doing drills and more drills, and mastering the basics was required before moving on — you can’t dribble a basketball between your legs if you can’t dribble at all. The approach to learning physics really isn’t any different.

The Vacuum is an Interesting Place

Posted on by

Vacuum has friction from an effect similar to the casimir effect

The phenomenon of vacuum friction for spinning objects is somewhat different than for the static parallel plates: the accelerating charges in a spinning conductive object interact with the vacuum fluctuations and can emit photons.

A quick scan of the paper (pdf) indicates that the thermally radiated photons have a different net angular momentum than the ones absorbed from the reservoir, i.e. the effect is that the emitted light has a net polarization which carries off the angular momentum as the particle slows down.

ORLY, O'Reilly?

Posted on by

The Bill O’Reilly “God of the gaps” incredul-o-fest video spawned a number meme-o-grams, some of which I have seen on reddit. Now I see links to collections of them over at Bad Astronomy.

The comments in the BA post are interesting, too, especially the ones with the “why are you picking on him” flavor. It’s because he’s embracing willful ignorance and encouraging people to run away from critical thought. It was bad enough that he had repeated the “you can’t explain tides” canard until it blew up. But the kicker is defending his “facts don’t matter” attitude with his fallacy-laden argument. With that he’s inviting scorn and ridicule. It would be rude not to accept.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Posted on by

Citizen activist grates on state over traffic signals

Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.

This seems rather silly, and I suspect it’s just payback. I can tell you when some piece of work is done by a professional engineer: it has a stamp on the document, and it’s signed. I am at a loss as to why it would take “three or four months” to figure this out. Because if simply using engineering equations is illegal without professional certification (as if you need an engineering safety course to handle them correctly), then anyone training to be a professional engineer is breaking the law.

The Making of James Bond

Posted on by

Terence Young: James Bond’s Creator?

Was Sam Spade charming? Phillip Marlowe? No. Their magnetism relied upon a novelist´s scratch of the pen or a female character that was there simply to fall for the hero. James Bond in the books suffered from the same malady, but what if Young and Maibaum could come up with a different approach. What if Bond CHARMED the ladies into bed. What if Bond could be taken back to the Errol Flynn personae that Fleming truly believed he had created. Bond would be a man of action like Flynn´s Don Juan, but now, for the first time, he wouldn´t just kiss the girl then swing out the window on a conveniently placed rope. This character was spending the night. James Bond was about to become irresistible to women AND he was going to bed the female characters with handsome good looks, and charm.

The Non-Physics of Rockets

Posted on by

Space Stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.

The development of rockets — driven by war and the invention of nuclear weapons, and the relationship the story has with recent economics and innovation.

The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.